Page 4386 - Week 15 - Wednesday, 21 November 1990
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disappointed with the quality of that advice, and ... said so in the J.P.R. At that stage, however, I did not believe that information had been kept from the members of the government. I did indicate, however, that I did not see that the Group had taken account of what any educationist worth his/her salt would surely recognise as the main criteria, namely the social context of a school and its inherent quality ...
d. After many hours of discussion in several J.P.R. meetings, and also after one long Cabinet meeting -
not that I was involved -
there seemed to be an impasse beyond which we could not go.
Those who were there will remember that all too well. I went on:
From the Rally point of view we had clawed back the number of proposed closures from 25 to 7 -
at that point. I continued:
So in a formal way, an exercise in formality, if you like, I moved the acceptance of that proposal at that point.
I assure you that it was no laughing matter. It was a very serious matter. My submission continued:
e. Within days, of course, we discovered the even greater inadequacy of the briefing material, especially when much of it was re-issued, without confidentiality -
I stress that, and that of course then negated the original confidentiality of the earlier document -
to the school communities. We then began to discover that documents had been ignored. (I make no comment as to whether or not this was deliberate. It could have been no more than incompetence or oversight.) Even more importantly, the individual schools began to find what they claimed were errors, partisan positions, mis-statements and mis-understandings in that material.
I endorsed the worries of the school communities about this partisanship. The most glaring example to me was not the omission of the undertakings given to some of the schools that there would be no further review of their situation for five years. That was bad enough.
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